Tag Archives for parasite

Friday mystery object #433 answer

last week I gave you a slightly misleading mystery object to identify:

The European Sprat Sprattus sprattus (Linnaeus, 1758) was the obvious object in the image, but I was actually interested in the parasite attached to its eye:

With that trailing pair of egg strings, this delightful ocular assailant bears a similarity to a past mystery object that also parasitises fish.

Friday mystery object #287 Lepeophtheirus hippoglossi (Krøyer, 1837) from the Grant Museum of Zoology, UCL.

If you can remember that far back, you may remember that fish parasite was a member of the Copepoda, which is a group within the Crustacea. Most (although not all) copepods that parasitise fish are members of the Siphonostomatoidae and this week’s mystery object is part of that same Order.

For this particular specimen you don’t really need to get too bogged down in the taxonomy to work out what it is, especially if you recognise the host fish. A quick web search for “Sprat eye parasite” will take you straight to the correct species, although if you search for “fish eye parasite” you’ll eventually find it, after trawling through some fascinating information about the body-snatching eye fluke Diplostomum, which alters its host’s behaviour to make it less, and then more likely to be eaten by predators. And who wouldn’t want to take that informational detour?

So as most people figured out, this is charmingly named Sprat Eye-maggot Lernaeenicus sprattae (Sowerby, 1806).

While we’re taking informational detours, I thought you might appreciate the initial species account for this delightful critter:

Sowerby, J. (1806). The British miscellany; or, Coloured figures of new, rare, or little known animal subjects: many not before ascertained to be inhabitants of the British Isles: and chiefly in the possession of the author, James Sowerby. R. Taylor & Co., London, Vol. 1-2 136 pp., 76 plates.

I hope you enjoyed the challenge and that this eyeball sucking miscreant hasn’t left you too traumatised.

Friday mystery object #337 answer

Last week I gave you this largely amorphous blob to have a go at identifying:

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Perhaps unsurprisingly it proved quite tricky, with most people opting for a brain, heart or gland of some kind. However, believe it or not, this is actually a whole animal.

In the comments a close suggestion came from palfreyman1414 who said:

“…invasive crab lip parasitical crustacean isolated…”

Tony Irwin clearly knew the actual answer with a nicely crafted cryptic link to the two common sequential hosts of this animal, the Flounder and the Cod. Meanwhile, on Twitter there were another couple of suggestions – one was a good general biological principle:

The other was a straight-up correct answer from Dr Ross Piper, an old zoological buddy from postgrad days and an aficionado of odd animals:

This is indeed a Codworm or Lernaeocera branchialis (Linnaeus, 1767) a type of copepod parasite that has a life history in which they spend part of their mobile larval stage parasitising flounders (and similar fish that sit around a lot) until they’re able to mate, at which point the fertilised female seeks out one of the mobile gadoid fish (the Cod family), where she gets into the gills and plumbs herself in to the Cod’s blood supply right at the heart, with her egg sacs at the gills and protected by the operculum (gill covers). She then spends the rest of her life sustained by fish blood, releasing eggs into the water and looking like a black pudding being eaten by maggots. Now those are life goals.

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Adult female Codworm in Whiting gills. Image by Hans Hillewaert, 2006

Friday mystery object #287 answer

Last week I gave you this specimen from the Grant Museum of Zoology Micrarium to try your hand at identifying:

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I enjoyed the variety of entertaining answers, ranging from a preschool drawing of a grandma with a beehive hairdo to a larval Alien, but I was also impressed by the range of cryptic clues about the identity of the specimen.

A favourite was a reference to “dealing with a pea covering” or variations on that theme, which gives us “Cope” and “pod”, which is what this is – a Copepod (which means “oar-foot” in Greek). For those of you unfamiliar with copepods are small crustaceans, many of which live as zooplankton and that as a group may make up the majority of the Earth’s animal biomass. They’re tiny, but there are countless billions of them.

This one isn’t as tiny as many of its relatives, because it has a rather different lifestyle to planktonic forms. This is a sea louse and it’s a parasite of fish. They feed on the mucus, skin and blood of fish and if they reach high levels of infestation they can be a real problem, potentially killing fish. This particular specimen has two trailing egg cases, which I think threw some of you. It was removed from a Brill and as Daniel Calleri recognised from a visit to the Grant Micrarium, it’s Lepeophtheirus hippoglossi (Krøyer, 1837).

If you’ve been to the Grant Museum and have photos from the Micrarium, or if you have any photos of tiny animals, you might fancy entering a Twitter and Instagram competition by sharing them with the hashtag #MicroMultitudes, Have fun with your photos!

Friday mystery object #46 answer

Last Friday Mark Carnall from the Grant Museum of Zoology provided a guest mystery object in the rather unpleasant looking form of this:

It looks a bit like part of a spinal column, but it isn’t. It looks like a worm of some kind, but it isn’t. So what is it?

David Craven and Dave Godfrey came through with the goods on this one. It is a parasitic crustacean related to the tongue worms (a misnomer because they are not worms at all) and it is in the genus Continue reading →